NEEDLING

There’s a time for everything, and that means there’s a time to call it quits. And that’s exactly what I’m gonna do just about now. It’s been fun, I’ve enjoyed this blog, it’s given me a place to rant and write about whatever. But now it’s time to move on. I’ve done a live journal before, and there was a time when that journal had to be stopped, so like today, I’ve decided it is time to stop this blog. One of the principal reasons being basically the lack of time. Another one being constant problems with this computer, and being tired of spending so much time – when I’ve already go so little to spare – fighting these problems.

I will continue to write of course, but I will go back to the personal journal thing, the one just for me written long-hand on which I can scratch any time of the day or night, at work or at home, at and about or hanging in my backyard.

That’s another thing, I need to get my garden going... get all those herbs which need to be planted in fall so they can come out in spring... but mostly, I need to find the time and the energy to write Delicious Love. I’m way behind on the Nanowrimo thing-a-jimmy... and that’s fine, I don’t care. That’s not the point.

So if you want to read my silly words, then go there to check them out. If not, no worries. Go drink yourself some good wine.

(This blog will go off the net in the next month or so... this is the 131st entry, more than sixty thousand words and a bit more than nine months of my life...)

Cheers, and thank you for your visits...

F.K. Needles

This morning on the fourth day of the month of November, I have written only one entry in my NaNoWriMo blog… which puts me way behind on my word count (50,000 by the end of the month! Yikes...)

Going to work yesterday, driving around town, seeing people going around doing their business as if nothing had happened.

Maybe nothing did.

I know I don’t feel so good, though... But a new day is a new day, and one has to get out of bed and keep going… right? Shouldn’t I just not care? It’s not as if I can do anything about anything…

So I’ll simply have my coffee and try to write my next NaNoWriMo entry.

First, I want to publish here a little poem I wrote a few years ago:


Between the Emperor’s toes

Allied with the trees
the freezing nights, my cursed belly aches
and the pains in my calves
from pushing the pedals of my bicycle
through these hilly roads

I’ve decided:
I will not kiss the Emperor’s toes!

The Emperor’s feet are moldy
between the big toe and the next
incrusted inside hardened socks
grows the imperial mushrooms.

They don’t make you giggle
like a schoolgirl over her first loving kisses

you don’t fry them in salted butter
with garlic, parsley and sweet spices

they’re much more explosive than all that
growing to high sinking heavens.

By kissing your feet, dear little Emperor
all we see is you and your arguments

it is as if the world existed, my noble
republican, only for your requirements.

Even if your nails are painted red
your toes adorned with golden rings
perfumed with flowery speeches
and sweetened with my liberty on a leech

I will not kiss your toes!
Oh, nasty, nasty little Emperor
you are
trying to trick us like that.

Wouldn’t you like our tongues
to lick the mold from your feet
to suck the puss from the growth
on your heals
while you set a platter on our backsides
and dine in peace

without smelling your own stinking feet?

What a feeling to wake up in the morning understanding half the people in the country in which you live are complete utter ignorant morons who have no…

Oh... fuck it...

Can’t even write. Can’t even express my feelings other than saying that I'm feeling extremely disgusted.

The only good thing I can think of is that four more years of that asshole might take this country so far into the red, ostracize so many more of its supposed allies, take away so many more of its citizens’ rights, cut taxes a little more for a few more billionaire, screw up the environment so far bad none of it will matter anyway, that this country – this sleeping self-absorbed giant – might actually wake up and revolt itself!

What is it going to take to burst America’s protective bubble? The bubble in which half this country lives in?

There are more guns in this country than anybody can imagine. A revolution around here would be one bloody bath. The same people who have put George Wanker back in office – the farmers, the trailer-living communities, the Cubans, the waitresses, the bible-thumping white trash, the low-paying workers who elected him for his supposed "moral values" et cetera – are the same people who are going get hurt the most by him. Once they finally get it through their thick heads that Bush is after everything they don’t have, and that Bush is going to make sure they’ll have to work longer hours, more days, harder, for less money, less freedoms, less everything, then maybe they’ll finally wake up and smell the fucking coffee.

We can only hope.

If you happen to live in the United States and that you also happen to be a citizen of said country. Play THIS game, then get yourself out of your house and GO VOTE!

(Link, thanks to Tracie.)

Trying to get writing. That first sentence is the hardest. I know where I want to go but how do I get started? What will take me on my way? Do I start with the name of one of my principal characters and tell the reader that he’s standing there pondering life? That’s pretty boring. My principal character is a young woman around eighteen, but neither her nor her boyfriend come into the story for yet a few pages, which leaves me with the old man she works for, the one person who along with his wife and colleagues will change this young woman’s life in ways neither her nor most anybody else can imagine. So how do I start.

Can’t I simply say:

Mr. Polk stood by his window staring in the general direction of the Eiffel Tower while his guests sitting around the diner table sat silently waiting for their host to come out of his reverie.

It gives some necessary information. For example that he’s not alone, that we’re probably around diner or lunch time, that considering that he can see the Eiffel tower from his window, that he “ponders”, that he has guests sitting around a diner table silently waiting for him, then we’re probably talking about a rich respected man living in a posh apartment. All this is good. I just don’t like starting with the name of the person.

In my treatment, I have:

We meet three couples getting up in age.

That’s direct, and just fine for a treatment or an outline, but it won’t do for anything else.

He could see the Eiffel tower from his window, though he wasn’t really looking at it, nor at the bateaux mouches slowly making their u-turns, docking and unloading their tourists on the quai of the river.

The story takes place in France, partly in Paris... but that’s not the point of the story, and I don’t want Paris to be a central element of the story, though it does affect the narrative... I just cannot have it so predominantly in the beginning.

I'll figure it out.